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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mike Buckley who wrote (35860)	12/1/2000 11:40:59 PM
From: Mike Buckley	Respond to of 54805

Frank, Another good article about Cisco in the Nov. 13 issue of Forbes. Ya gotta read it! It shows a really unique way of building a stronger customer base within the value chain and it has absolutely nothing to do with pitching product. --Mike Buckley

To: Mike Buckley who wrote (35860)	12/1/2000 11:52:56 PM
From: kumar	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

OT : those of us who are competitors to Sun, in our day jobs, have been doing our best to exploit this fiasco. How/why did HWP win Amazon.com ? cheers, kumar

To: Mike Buckley who wrote (35860)	12/2/2000 12:00:50 AM
From: Thomas Mercer-Hursh	Respond to of 54805

So, where has Forbes been for the last couple of months? This is hardly current news. I can't say that I am in on the details, but this feels a lot like that Pentium bug from a while back where Intel wasn't as up front as they have since learned to be, i.e., not something that actually impacted a large percentage of the user base, but handled badly so that it created more stench than it needed to.

To: Mike Buckley who wrote (35860)	12/2/2000 6:59:05 AM
From: Todd Bishop	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

All the folks investing in Sun who are doing so largely on the basis of their success with servers should read "Sun Screen," a major article in the Nov 13 Forbes. On the left page in big print it sez, "Sun Microsystems' servers have been crashing for more than a year. Sun has kept the flaw secret -- and hasn't fixed it yet." On the right the big print sez, "Scott McNealy's challenge: how to win back the trust of his customers. Some are mighty angry." Must be another slow news day. There are so many bugs in each of our favorite companies' systems that singling one company out like this is ludicrous. I work with Cisco, Nortel, 3Com and occasionally Lucent and these companies have so many bugs that I get a new list monthly. Cisco went so far as to make a very nice app on their website called the "Bug Navigator". The same is true for the server and OS market. Sun publishes these bugs on their website typically and I'd be surprised if they hid one. Some bugs are harder than others to identify and most of these companies try to take the attitude that they know they have bugs and they help their customers supply them with the info needed to correct them. Some are better than others and will admit to a bug before they are even sure it really is their fault. Cisco has taken the attitude on a few occasions with me that although they followed a particular spec correctly but another vendor did not, that Cisco issued a patch so that they would be compatible with this other vendor's product. I've had good experiences with Sun as well although much fewer since I leave that to my Unix co-workers. I hate to see a company get railroaded over such a common industry-wide phenomenon. I guess they all must take their punches. Microsoft has taken so many that it is the subject of more jokes than I can take. Just keep in mind how few times you've heard Sun in the news for such a problem, not to mention HP. Todd Bishop todd@mybrowsercrashedjustryintosendthismessagethe1sttime.com

To: Mike Buckley who wrote (35860)	12/2/2000 11:57:45 AM
From: - with a K	Respond to of 54805

Here's the first page of the article from: forbes.com Sun Screen Daniel Lyons, Forbes Global, 11.13.00 The mysterious glitch has been popping up since late last year. At a new web company in San Francisco, a telecommunications company in the midwestern U.S., a Baby Bell in Atlanta, Georgia, anInternet domain registry on the U.S. East Coast, high-end servers made by Sun Microsystems have, for no apparent reason, suddenly crashed. It doesn't happen to all, nor all the time, but it has happened enough to cause problems for America Online, Ebay and dozens of other major corporate accounts, baffling the Sun engineers who have spent months trying to identify the problem. Adding to the mystery is Sun's own reticence. It has never issued a warning to its customers or disclosed the flaw to new buyers. For months Sun told customers seeking a repair that they must sign a legal agreement promising to keep it secret. Many still don't dare to speak out, and Sun still hasn't published an official explanation of the bug on its main website. Sun says that it has finally figured out what's wrong. It is an odd problem involving stray cosmic rays and memory chips in the flagship Enterprise server line, whose models are priced at $50,000 to more than $1 million. Yet Sun won't fix all of the servers it has sold; instead it will make repairs only when it deems them necessary. "We're dealing with this on a one-to-one basis with customers who have had a problem,"says John Shoemaker, the executive vice president in charge of Sun's high-end server business. When the crashes began more than a year ago, Sun believed that the problem was caused not by its boxes but by some flaw in customer data centers. As the months went by and shutdowns kept happening, customers began leaking word of their predicament. Gartner Group, a research company, put out a bulletin. Computerworld, a trade publication, ran a story accompanied by an editorial that criticized Sun's treatment of its customers. Suddenly Sun, a bright star in the high-tech firmament and proud of the power and reliability of its products, finds itself taking heat both for quality and for what looks like a clumsy cover-up. It is not clear whether this will slow Sun's momentum. It owns 43% of the $32 billion market for Unix servers. Sun sales grew 60%, to $5 billion, in the third quarter; net soared 85%, to $510 million. But with this stock Wall Street won't brook any disappointments. At $117, up 70% since January, Sun shares go for 90 times this year's expected earnings. Last November, Verisign Global Registry Services, a domain name registry, was down for two hours after a crucial Sun box crashed. Verisign complained but got no explanation. A few months later an executive at Verisign ran across the Gartner bulletin. "I said to Sun, 'My God, you knew about this problem, and you didn't tell me? That's unconscionable,'" he says. Verisign still uses Sun for some tasks but has moved important systems onto IBM Unix servers. Earlier this year Sun stopped asking aggrieved customers to sign nondisclosure agreements, Shoemaker says. He insists that Sun wanted only to stop the disclosure of secrets about its products, not gag them: "In retrospect, I would not do it again."